This article is part of the Future of AI, a collectsion of articles that investigates how artificial intelligence will impact the fashion and beauty industries in the years to come.
The beauty sector is the corner of luxury that’s been the fastest to adopt AI, and as the technology swiftly evolves, beauty conglomerates are racing to grab a piece of the AI pie. In recent months, L’Oréal and AI chipmaker Nvidia have expanded their AI partnership for beauty R&D, Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) tapped AI startup Rezolve AI to better develop its brands websites for search and discovery across 70 markets in EMEA, and LVMH announced it would deepen its partnership with Google for its fashion and beauty businesses, which includes branded AI chatbot MaIA.
Beauty AI firms are winning over bands big and small, promising growth that may previously have been out of reach. Here are four emerging AI companies — backed by beauty giants — shaping the future of beauty.
Founder(s): Joshua Britton
Funding to date: $80 million
Key investors: L’Oréal’s venture fund Bold, Material Impact, Fine Structure Ventures, and GS Futures
AI in the beauty space is all about speed. At Debut, Joshua Britton has built a platform that combines AI with genomics (the study of gene functions and interactions), biotechnology, and compresses years of R&D into months, enabling the creation of entirely new, high-performance ingredients without relying entirely on a chemist. The technology collectss formulas and data to make new ingredients, putting it to test based on studies it has gathered from brands and labs.
“By accelerating millions of years of evolution, we can design targeted ingredients with clinically validated performance in emerging areas of skin science,” says Britton, founder and CEO of Debut, which launched in 2019 with a focus on biotech within beauty. The brand works with the L’Oréal portfolio and Image Skincare, as well as Formula Fig, an aesthetic treatment clinic and retailer.
In January, the company launched Dermceutical EDL, a topical bioactive ingredient that delivers a professional-grade skin tightening similar to Botox. EDL works by activating the cellular pathways targeted by clinical procedures, and stimulates dermal fibroblasts to boost elastin, which achieves clinically proven results in skin tightness and firmness.
Britton predicts that AI in beauty will shift to be performance-driven with innovations in biotechnology, where the line between beauty, pharmaceuticals, and nutrition will blur increasingly because of the acceleration of AI. “The current set of active ingredients will be replaced by molecules with yet-to-be-imagined functionalities,” he says. “Their names may be unfamiliar today, but their outstanding scientific performance and beauty-forward claims will quickly establish their ascendancy, all validated by clinical testing.”
Looking ahead, Britton believes his company will venture into related industries, including food, beverage, and performance nutrition. “In this industrial revolution, we’re not turning to nature to discover a new plant, nor waiting for a chemist to invent something,” he says.
Founder(s): Anastasia Georgievskaya and Konstantin Kiselev
Funding to date: $2.8 million
Key investors: Ulta Beauty’s venture capital firm LongeVC, Grupo Boticário, and Prisma Ventures
Haut.AI co-founder Anastasia Georgievskaya is a scientist by training with a degree in biophysics. She began her career working in drug discovery, before moving into cosmetic manufacturing and testing. “It was very revealing while analyzing all of these clinical studies that skincare products work, but for some reason, consumers think that they don’t,” says Georgievskaya. “The reason is because we’re not all experiencing the same effect of the product.”
Haut.AI’s technology analyzes skin health and recommends products based on the analysis. Through launching Haut.AI, Georgievskaya’s mission has been to have personalized skincare routines at the fingertips of consumers through their mobiles. The platform has also been venturing into hair analysis, a category expansion for the AI tool.
Haut.AI’s technology has been adopted by a number of beauty brands including Neutrogena, Beiersdorf, Clarins, Grupo Boticário, and Ulta Beauty, where the AI powers the app, which features its beauty loyalty program that has surpassed 44 million members. Recently, Haut.AI started working with Noom, the health company that pairs GLP-1 medication with a personalized program called Future Me, and through Haut.AI, users can utilize the SkinGPT engine, allowing users to visualize how their skin will change over the time with different products and lifestyles.
As AI becomes ubiquitous, Haut.AI has been working on incorporating legal guardrails and data security into the business. Georgievskaya’s Skin Atlas — which came into development in 2021 — is a technology that can leverage clinical data to simulate the outcomes of a treatment. “We strip photos of users to conceal all of their identity details, and then we transform it into a generated AI texture that has information about your skin, without storing any of your private or identifying details,” she says. Besides privacy, this feature was designed to optimize facial recognition for AI.
Georgievskaya foresees the beauty industry merging with pharmaceuticals and operating in the same way, where AI will be designing new ingredients. “I think we will probably have some products that will give you a face lift over time. And in skincare, we will be able to modify facial features over the course of four to eight weeks,” she says.
Founder(s): Philip Smolin, Melissa Munnerlyn, and Justin Stewart
Funding to date: $11 million
Key investors: Silicon Road Ventures, Bullpen Capital, GFT Ventures, and Red Bike Capital
When AI-powered beauty insights platform Daash launched, its goal was to educate and set up businesses for success during the early stages of the go-to-market lifecycle. “All these big strategic decisions should be much more data-driven, because the beauty industry is a highly competitive place and the legacy intelligence tools that are around are designed for large conglomerates,” says co-founder Philip Smolin.
Daash uses an alt-data methodology that sources information through licensed consumer research panels, which is augmented with the publicly available data published by brands and retailers, as well as data from their collaborators. When all of the data is collated into Daash’s AI system, a report is produced outlining consumer patterns, what’s selling in stores, and what products users are interacting with online. These estimates are tested by brands and then sent back to Daash, which sketches out the accuracy of each category. “The platform gets smarter over time as it works with more data and brands — we’re training the platform to lead to more accuracy,” says Smolin. The report deep dives into how a product or brand is performing in a category and against its competitors.
Smolin anticipates that the future of beauty will be all about speed with classic product development cycles cut down to weeks. He expects novel chemistries to take longer because of the testing cycles involved, but in terms of reformulations, where brands are mixing existing ingredients, he argues those will speed up aggressively.
Being data-driven will be king for brands and companies, looking to make waves in the multi-product and multinational beauty business. “If you add up innovation with personalization, brand identity, and speed it leads to a success formula,” says Smolin. However, he argues that it is “human vision” that will truly stand out in a future of AI.
Founder(s): Amos Susskind and Maëlle Gasc
Funding to date: Undisclosed
Key investors: L’Oréal Group
Noli, a L’Oréal Group-backed AI-powered platform, matches users with products based on their skin and hair types, after uploading images of themselves onto the website or using the mobile app. The platform is still in its early stages and is working with 20 L’Oréal brands including Cerave, La Roche-Posay, Kiehl’s, Aesop, and Lancôme. It also stocks Doré, which is a non-L’Oréal brand.
The AI platform leverages the research and data from L’Oréal rather than harvesting information from across the internet. “It is not built to sell the consumer more products, but the right ones,” says Firdaous El Honsali, Noli’s chief marketing officer, who joined from Unilever. The platform’s AI advisor is constantly undergoing updates, and Noli will soon be unveiling a routine curation tool that helps its users to build bespoke skincare routines.
Noli’s next step as a business is to capture more beauty categories beyond skincare, such as makeup and haircare. “I believe AI will be everywhere. Supporting product development as much as supporting the consumer in their purchase decisions,” El Honsali says. “But the touch of magic will always be coming from the humans behind this incredible industry, that’s the bold statement.”
Many AI firms predict that the greatest effect AI will have on the beauty industry is the speed of formulations, clinical testing, and product rollouts. However, they flag that all these new innovations will require a human touch to root them back into reality.
AI in beauty is also proving to be a fruitful business. Tech firms are receiving funding from conglomerates in the millions much quicker and easier than beauty brands that have been in the game for much longer — this is fueled by consumers seeking constant innovation. “Consumers are extraordinarily demanding. They want personalization that feels genuine, not gimmicky, and they will abandon a brand the moment the technology feels like a parlour trick,” says Lilac Watt, principal at Venrex, a UK-based venture capital firm that has recently partnered with the British Beauty Council to help brands and founders with product development, supply chain, and packaging solutions. “The startups that are getting this right are building something genuinely difficult: AI that earns trust.”
In the last two years, AI in beauty has matured and advanced beyond e-commerce and virtual try-ons — its focus is now on reshaping the industry to streamline operations. ELC has been ramping up its AI efforts by experimenting with different categories. At the end of 2025, ELC-owned Jo Malone London introduced its AI-powered scent advisor that helps online customers feel more involved in the process of buying fragrances through a conversational journey, which was powered by Google’s AI platforms Gemini and Vertex.
At LVMH, the focus on AI has been widespread. In 2021, it struck a deal with Google Cloud covering demand forecasts, product personalization, and a more rigorous IT infrastructure with stronger security. The company also increased its AI initiatives in 2025 to battle the luxury slowdown by incorporating AI into areas such as supply chain planning, pricing, product design, and marketing.
“The most fundable companies aren’t just building consumer features, they’re building proprietary data assets, skin biomarker libraries, formulation models, and diagnostic engines,” says Watt. As they gradually fine-tune their dictation of trends, new ingredients development and technologies, AI beauty firms are setting up a future where they could be on par with the beauty giants.
